Lemon Foundation

It seems that every week that passes, I experience that clients are getting more and more adventurous with their online plans, and thus their willingness to part with more and more budget.  That’s great, but what’s prompting this change in attitude?

To be honest, I’ve got some ideas and hunches but I’m not completely sure – I always saw the potential of digital to engage audiences and give ROI, even when the chips were down in 2001 and no-one was hiring, but the mood at the moment is indeed surprising.

Just today I was talking with a friend of mine who needed some campaign advice, and he was talking about a massive campaign with tentacles in virtually every digital pie that you could think of (TV, email, RSS, Adwords, Viral movie, banners -> all pointing to a campaign microsite) for a European campaign that ‘till now would never have gotten the budget they have already burnt, before even starting.  It’s a 9 month project kicking off shortly, and he mentioned that the only thing that’s letting the budget out the strongbox is that it’s “measurable”…. Funny that – it was measurable in ’99 (at least, mostly) – so obviously perceptions have changed, or people are getting the hang of things, or there are some very competent, mature salespeople around, or all of the above.  Or it’s become measurable to the bean counters.

I suppose the bottom line is that these days, digital is a part of life in pretty much every way you dice it, at least very definitely more so than it was in 2001. 

OK, we all watch TV, but we’re also all using email now – unless of course you’re living like Turkish in Snatch, in a caravan under a bridge (but even then I reckon Turkish had a Hotmail account lying around for his dodgy subscriptions) – and we’re starting to do the new stuff like MySpace and Bebo that allows us to communicate and engage with others. 

So, I figure that if that’s the way your audience is growing, then that’s where you need to reach them, which in turn means a rounded, targeted campaign that utilises each and every penny as efficiently as your ROI calculations will allow.

Bottom line is that these days it probably is easier to calculate the difference in return between an email and banner campaign vs. a print and TV campaign, and you can calculate it with your Blackberry on the tube home if you want to; so if you’re targeting a particular group of people that all hang out at a particular place, or search for similar things online, then why wouldn’t you want to spend more money where you can measure it easily, and where you could probably get better service provider value for money than you would at one of the traditional advertising agencies who have only just gotten wind of MySpace / Bebo / Google / Pay-per-Call?  Added to that, you can split your online spend to segment just as much as you could your old print campaign, perhaps even more – all you need is the willingness to try and a little savvy to point you in the right direction.

So, looking ahead, I figure the key is to consider whether times are in fact changing for you and your industry, and then what your major marketing drives are over the next year, factoring in whether you can (and indeed want to) augment or replace your traditional spend with online spend, using the inherent measurability of online activities for key performance analytics – they key then is not so much what and where, but how you execute such a campaign, for it to be successful, but we’ll leave that for another article ;-)